Movie Review: Hold the Dark (Netflix Original) (English)

When lupine-obsessive author and naturalist Russell Core lands in the desolate Alaskan village of Keelut, he is a man on a mission. Primarily to put a mother out of her misery at having lost her young six-year-old son Bailey to a pack of wolves. But also so that he can meet his estranged daughter who is living in Anchorage. Medora Slone, the said mother, is well aware that her son isn't coming back, but what she wants is for Core to kill the wolf that took Bailey and present it as some sort of evidence for her husband Vernon, a ruthless psychopath suffering from PTSD who operates on a moral compass of his own and is away on duty fighting a war in Iraq. "Do you have any idea what's outside those windows? How black it gets, how it gets in here?," she asks Core at one point, subtly hinting at the fate that awaits him, and soon enough what seemed like a man-vs-nature survivalist tale morphs into something unsettling that's part noir and part violent art-horror, and most importantly a disquieting saga that leaves no room for easy answers.

Hold the Dark is a beautiful-but-grim journey so bleak that it's not hard to be swept away by the sea of overwhelming blackness that pervades the film. You could say it's even pitch-dark to a fault. But a rewarding experience it doubtless is, especially for its exploration of dying indigenous cultures, the urban-rural divide and mankind's propensity for violence and self-protection. The eerie backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness becomes an expansive playground for various genre tropes, resulting in an atmospheric thriller punctuated by episodes of grisly violence and supernatural folklore. The mix is not always satisfying, its deliberately slow-burn narrative intended to be mysterious and intense can be a little too much to take in, but Jeremy Saulnier (of Blue Ruin and Green Room fame) and screenwriter Macon Blair maintain a firm grip over the film's tone, keeping it ice-cold, brooding and unforgiving while being more than content to keep specific plot points and some seriously twisted turns in the dark than actually revealing all the connections that undergird the story. Terrifying, unnerving and primal, Hold the Dark is an enigmatic puzzle that blurs the line between man and beast.